High Prices Have Americans Reconsidering Their Refusal To Buy EVs

Electric vehicles don’t run on gasoline, which makes them very bad if you’re a gas company or a politician in the pocket of oil and gas lobbyists. Most Americans, however, are not oil execs or Republican politicians, and turns out, when you make everything else super expensive, many of us are more than willing to abandon the internal combustion engine in favor of saving money. As the Financial Times reports, recent jumps in gas prices have led to a big boost in used EV sales. 

In the first quarter of 2026, used EV sales jumped 17% compared to the previous quarter and increased 12% year-over-year. Those increases stand in stark contrast to new EVs, which have seen U.S. sales fall 28% on the year. Of course, much of the drop in new EV sales can be attributed to Republicans killing the federal EV tax credit, but that doesn’t necessarily explain the jump in used EV sales. According to the Financial Times, rising gas prices are pushing more buyers to consider giving up on gas altogether, but the real key has been their low resale value compared to internal combustion cars. 

Buyers looking to save money might be willing to pay a small premium to get a car that costs significantly less to fill up, but if it’s too high, why bother switching from what you know? Over the last year, the average price of a used EV has fallen 8.5%. And while we were previously looking at a typical price difference of $4,923 between the average used EV and the average used ICE car, that difference has now fallen to only $1,334. Meanwhile, by the end of the year, Experian says it expects used EVs to increase from 7.7% of all off-lease vehicles in the U.S. to 15%. That could spell massive losses for car companies who own those leases, but it could mean savings for car shoppers willing to make the leap into electrons.

While electric cars are almost as old as the car itself, modern EV technology is still relatively new, and that’s going to come with higher prices. But when Democrats created the federal EV tax credit, it didn’t just boost interest in a beneficial technology that we wanted to see succeed long-term. It also allowed dealers to sometimes lease EVs for less than their ICE alternatives. For example, the Financial Times pointed to the Chevrolet Blazer, which could be leased as an EV for $515 a month with an MSRP of $44,600, while the ICE version leased for $586, even though its MSRP was only $35,600. As new ICE car prices are rising, more people are being forced into the used market, making EVs and even more attractive, affordable option. 

Those leases are now landing back on the used market with low resale value compared to many ICE cars. As Jessica Caldwell, Edmunds’ head of insights, said used car buyers checking out those cheap off-lease EVs are likely finding much more tempting choices than they had if they last looked at used EVs back after Putin invaded Ukraine and sent gas prices through the roof. “In 2022, the last time we saw a gas price spike, they would have been looking at vehicles from around 2019, when EVs weren’t quite there yet,” Caldwell told the Financial Times.

So that’s is then? Woke leftist Donald J. Trump pretended he was going to kill the EV industry only to secretly engineer a plot to save it? Not necessarily. We still haven’t quite solved the whole “getting people to buy new EVs” problem yet, and new demand for the relatively limited number of used EVs available could soon drive those prices higher, until they’re no longer the tempting deals you see advertised today. But I’m certainly not going to complain about renewed interest in EVs and the possibility of actually seeing them go mainstream in the U.S.